Adam Rapacki

Adam Rapacki (24 December 1909-10 October 1970) was Foreign Minister of Poland from 1956 to 1968, succeeding Stanislaw Skrzeszewski and preceding Stefan Jedrychowski.

Biography
Adam Rapacki was born in Lemberg, Eastern Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine) in 1909. A German prisoner-of-war from 1939 to 1945 during World War II, he joined the Polish Socialist Party in 1945 and was a central figure behind its union with the communist Polish Workers' Party in 1948. He was a member of the party's central committee from 1948 to 1954 and from 1956 to 1968. In an address to the United Nations of 2 October 1957, he suggested the Rapacki Plan, which proposed a ban on the deployment of nuclear missiles in West and East Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. NATO refused, however, as it feared that the absence of nuclear weapons in these countries would accentuate the conventional military superiority of the Warsaw Pact. He died in Warsaw in 1970.